|
Part of the Problem..
Special Video
Series:
Alex Jones- American Scholars
Symposium, shown on C-SPAN on 7-29-06
Bush in China and not very happy..
After cutting short a press conference
in China on Sunday, President Bush tried to make a quick getaway, but
couldn't find the door out and admitted, "I was trying to escape.
Obviously, it didn't work." See the video
here.
...
In His Own Words
Among the words haunting George
W. Bush these days are ones he delivered in April 2004, at a Buffalo,
N.Y., appearance he made to talk up the U.S. Patriot Act. Shown below, the
key passage goes: "Anytime you hear the United States government talking
about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing
has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,
we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/politics/2006/01/03/bush/
After four years of the
badly botched "war on terror," are we ready to hear the hard words of
Robert Fisk -- a gutsy war correspondent who says the West has wronged the
Middle East? Click
here
for the story..
Salon.com
While some
Democrats are raising the specter of impeachment with respect to the
president's secret spying program, Rep. John Conyers has quietly
introduced a
resolution
calling for the creation of a House select committee to
determine whether Bush should be impeached for encouraging the torture of
detainees, misusing and misrepresenting intelligence about Iraq,
misleading Americans about the reasons for war there and retaliating
against critics, like former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who called his
actions into question. Continued
Democrats: DHS Hasn't Fulfilled Promises
By LARA JAKES JORDAN Associated
Press Writer
December 27,2005 | WASHINGTON -- The
Homeland Security Department, created in response to the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, has failed to fulfill 33 of its own pledges to better
protect the nation, according to a report released Tuesday by House
Democrats.
The report concludes that gaps
remain in federal efforts to secure an array of areas, including ports,
borders and chemical plants. There also are still delays in the
department's sharing terror alerts and other intelligence with state and
local officials, the review said.
Compiled for 13 Democrats on the
House Homeland Security Committee, the report analyzes public statements
and congressional testimony on Bush administration security goals since
2002.
Responding, Homeland Security
spokesman Russ Knocke said the department is prioritizing resources and
programs based on "today's greatest threats."
Continued
Does NBC's Andrea Mitchell know
something about the Bush administration's domestic spying program that the
rest of us don't? As AMERICAblog's
John Aravosis
notes, Mitchell put a question to the New York Times'
James Risen Tuesday that suggests that she might.
In an
interview
with Risen, Mitchell asked if he had any information
suggesting that the National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on CNN
correspondent
Christiane Amanpour. Risen said he hadn't heard that. Has Mitchell
heard something to that effect, or was she just using Amanpour's name as
the example of what might have gone wrong with the spying program?
We don't know the answer to that,
and neither does Aravosis. But as Aravosis notes, the
implications
of tapping Amanpour's phone lines could be enormous.
There's the chilling thought that government officials might be listening
in on the conversations of a reporter, and then there's this: Amanpour's
husband, who like any husband might have had occasion to use his wife's
phone, happens to be Jamie Rubin, the former Clinton administration
official who served as a foreign policy advisor for John Kerry's
presidential campaign.
Update:
As several readers note in the comments below, the exchange between
Mitchell and Risen about Amanpour has rather mysteriously disappeared from
the transcript of the interview posted on the MSNBC Web site. If MSNBC has
an explanation for why Mitchell's question and Risen's answer have
disappeared, we'd sure like to hear it. Did Mitchell not ask the question
-- that seems unlikely, doesn't it? -- or does someone at MSNBC just wish
she hadn't?
(Found at:
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/01/04/eavesdropping/index.html)
-- Tim Grieve
[15:33 EST, Jan.
4, 2006]
Who Is Giving Away Jack
Abramoff's Money?
By ELIZABETH WHITE Associated
Press Writer
January 05,2006 | -- President
Bush and several lawmakers have announced they are refunding or giving to
charity some or all of the donations they or their political action
committees received from once-powerful lobbyist Jack Abramoff, his
associates or clients.
Abramoff pleaded guilty Tuesday
to three federal charges as part of an agreement with prosecutors
requiring him to cooperate in a broad corruption investigation into
members of Congress.
This week:
--President Bush, $6,000 from
Abramoff, his wife and the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan for
the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign is being donated to the American
Heart Association. Abramoff raised at least $100,000 for the campaign.
--House Speaker Dennis Hastert,
R-Ill. A spokesman would not say much money Hastert received or
planned to donate.
--House Majority Leader Roy
Blunt, R-Mo., $8,500 to charity.
--Former House Majority Leader
Tom DeLay, R-Texas, $15,000 to local charities in suburban Houston.
Continued
It would be easy to miss them
amid all the attention paid to the Alito hearing and the Abramoff scandal,
but New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston has just produced a pair of
must-read stories about the way the Internal Revenue Service works under
George W. Bush.
In the
first of the stories, Johnston reports that the IRS has stopped
releasing information that shows "how thoroughly" it audits "big
corporations and the rich" and how deeply it discounts the taxes it
assesses after such audits. For decades, Johnston says, the IRS has made
this information available to a Syracuse University professor who has, in
turn, made it available to the public. But in May 2004, the IRS said it
would no longer provide this information, despite a 1976 court order that
required it to do so.
The information clampdown
shouldn't come as a surprise to those familiar with the way the Bush
administration views
government transparency. Over the last five years, the administration
has, among other things, eliminated statistics on global terrorism from
the State Department's annual report on global terrorism; deleted data
about racial profiling from a report about racial profiling; and tried to
discontinue a Labor Department report on layoffs. In each of those cases,
the administration moved to shut down the information flow when the data
to be released would have been politically embarrassing. The IRS insists
that it is withholding the audit information only out of concern for the
costs of providing it. But anyone care to wager that, if and when the IRS
faces a new court order to release the information, we'll begin to see
some other reasons that the Bush administration didn't want to release
this information anymore?
Continued
Rove: It's the (eternal) war, stupid!
In his first speech in two
months, "Bush's brain" laid out his plan for GOP victory: War, war and
more war.
By Walter Shapiro
Jan. 21, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- It
was Karl Rove's first public speech in two months. But there were no
dramatic cries of "He's back -- our long national nightmare is over!" when
the recently reclusive White House political guru appeared Friday before
several hundred members of the Republican National Committee.
While Rove is still dancing under
a legal cloud in the ongoing CIA leak investigation, he radiated no
visible signs of distress. A lesser man might have been daunted not only
by fears of a possible indictment by special prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald, but also by worries that the woeful 27 percent approval rate
(the Gallup Poll) for the Republican Congress presages a GOP rout in
November. Continued
The bin Laden Book Club
How the world's most notorious
terrorist just launched an obscure left-wing American author into
bestseller stardom.
By Michael Scherer
Jan. 21, 2006 | WASHINGTON --
Watch out, Oprah Winfrey, Osama bin Laden has jumped into the
book-promotion game.
On Wednesday, the 72-year-old
Washington author William Blum existed only on the fringes of the
publishing industry. His 2000 foreign-policy diatribe, "Rogue State: A
Guide to the World's Only Superpower," ranked No. 205,763 on Amazon's
bestseller list. His byline rarely appeared in print, he says, because
even left-leaning journals like the Nation often found his views too
radical.
But then the world's No. 1
newsmaker, bin Laden, showed up Thursday on the Al-Jazeera network to
promise another terrorist attack on America, ask President Bush to
withdraw American troops -- and plug Blum's book. "If Bush decides to
carry on with his lies and oppression," the reclusive terrorist announced,
in a video message bounced to a potential audience of billions, "it would
be useful for you to read the book 'Rogue State'."
Continued
Coretta
Scott King's Funeral and Politics
Mourning Doves
http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/politics/2006/02/07/kingfuneral /
Former Bush insider
Lawrence Wilkerson blasts Dick Cheney's "paranoia" -- and says Cheney and
Rumsfeld are to blame for Abu Ghraib.
By Mark Follman
Feb. 27, 2006 | WASHINGTON --
There's been no shortage of former high-level insiders going public with
fierce criticisms of the Bush administration. But since first speaking out
last fall, Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as former
Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, has proved the fiercest.
In a watershed speech at the New America Foundation in October, Wilkerson
delivered a blistering indictment, charging that on vital
national-security matters, the White House was run by an anti-democratic
"cabal" led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld.
Wilkerson has also suggested that
he and his boss at the State Department were duped by the case for war
forged inside the Pentagon and CIA under the close watch of Cheney and his
top aides. He and Powell were kept in the dark about doubts over Iraq's
WMD capabilities, even as they worked to vet the intelligence before
Powell's landmark pro-war presentation to the U.N. Security Council in
February 2003. It turned out to be built on a stockpile of fictions.
But Wilkerson said bogus
intelligence isn't his principal reason for coming forward -- it's the use
of American forces to torture prisoners in the war that it launched. In
mid-February, against a backdrop of
new revelations about torture at Abu Ghraib and a call by U.N.
investigators to shut down the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Wilkerson
sat down for an interview with Salon, following a panel on national
security at the University of Maryland. Last fall, he had spoken of a
"visible audit trail" on torture leading from the soldiers in the field
all the way up to Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Continued
The man was lost and
then he was found and now he's more lost than ever -- and he's taking us
into the darkness with him. It's time to remove him.
By Garrison Keillor
March 1, 2006 | These are
troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do,
even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is
belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist
writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you
want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. You hear young
people talk about America as if it's all over, and you trust that this is
only them talking tough. And then you read the paper and realize the
country is led by a man who isn't paying attention, and you hope that
somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, "Try Much
Harder."
Do we need to impeach him to
bring some focus to this man's life? The man was lost and then he was
found and now he's more lost than ever, plus being blind.
Continued
Tape: Bush, Chertoff
Warned Before Katrina
By MARGARET EBRAHIM and JOHN SOLOMON
Associated Press Writers
March 01,2006 | WASHINGTON -- In
dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned
President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina
struck that the storm could breach levees, risk lives in New Orleans'
Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage
of the briefings.
Bush didn't ask a single question
during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on
Aug. 29 but assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully
prepared."
Six days of footage and
transcripts obtained by The Associated Press show in excruciating detail
that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New
Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to
realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the
unprecedented disaster.
Continued
SCHOLARS REPUDIATE OFFICIAL
VERSION OF 9/11 Claim government's account violates laws of physics and
engineering
Duluth, MN (PRWEB) 27 January
2006 -- An influential group of prominent experts and scholars have joined
together alleging that senior government officials have covered up crucial
facts about what really happened on 9/11. The members of this new
non-partisan association, "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" (S9/11T), are
convinced their research proves the current administration has been
dishonest with the nation about events in New York and Washington, D.C.
These experts contend that books
and articles by members and associates have established that the World
Trade Center was almost certainly brought down by controlled demolitions
and that the available relevant evidence casts grave doubt on the official
story about the attack on the Pentagon. They believe that the government
not only permitted 9/11 to occur but may even have orchestrated these
events to facilitate its political agenda.
(Continued)
Rarely seen 5-Minute
Video
of George W. Bush on the Morning of 9/11
http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/bush-911.htm
During a talk today at Johns
Hopkins University,
the president of the United States was asked to share with aspiring
policymakers "some wisdom or some insight" based on his experience with
the "very difficult decisions on the use of force and engaging in war."
This is how he responded:
"Thanks for the question. I would
encourage those of you studying here to be a part of policymaking for our
government. It's -- it is a high honor to serve your country. And my first
advice is, never use force until you've exhausted all diplomacy. I -- my
second advice is, if you ever put anybody in harm's way, make sure they
have got all the support of the government. My third advice is, don't make
decisions on polls. Stand your ground if you think what you're doing [is]
right.
"Much of my decision about what
we're discussing these days was affected by an event. Look, I -- during
the 2000 campaign, I don't remember ever discussing with people what --
could I handle war, or could my opponent handle war. The war wasn't on our
mind. War came unexpectedly. We didn't ask for the attack, but it came.
And so much of the statements I make and have made since that war were a
result of that attack.
"I vowed then that I would use
all assets of our power to win the war on terror. That's what I vowed. It
-- the September 11th attacks affected me. It affected my thinking deeply.
The most important job of the government is to protect the people from an
attack. And so I said we were going to stay on the offense two ways: one,
hunt down the enemy and bring them to justice, and take threats seriously;
and two, spread freedom. And that's what we've been doing, and that's what
I'm going to continue to do as the president.
"I think about the war on terror
all the time. (continued)
The real sign of Stephen
Colbert's success at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner
wasn't his jokes -- which, from beginning to end, were spot-on, from
Bush's handling of the war ("I believe the government that governs best is
the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up
a fabulous government in Iraq") and his low-30s approval rating ("I ask
you this, does that not also logically mean that 68 percent approve of the
job he's not doing?") to sidelong whacks at John McCain, Fox News
and Donald Rumsfeld, among others. And no, it wasn't the grim-looking
handshake he received from the president or the icy glare he received from
Laura Bush that let us know that Colbert hit his targets. The proof of his
accuracy lies in how badly the
Tracy Flicks of the Washington press corps reacted. After all, this
wasn't the baby-soft slapstick they usually get at the correspondents'
dinner. (Anyone else remember when Darrell Hammond got all gushy from
meeting Bush in person in 2001? Yeesh.) Sure, C-SPAN's cameras captured a
few journalists tittering at each other like naughty schoolgirls, but for
the most part journalists sat on their hands –- while just moments before,
they were laughing uproariously at President Bush's incredibly lame skit
with a Bush impressionist. That was Colbert's real feat: Showing us the
real Washington media world, where everyone worries so much about
offending someone, anyone, that the least bit of frank talk turns
them into obedient little church mice. (Below is his opening monologue.
To
see his skit -- and icy exchange with the Bushes -- go to the
post below.)
http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/politics/2006/04/30/colbert_press /
C-SPAN is replaying it only sparingly
today, so here's Stephen Colbert's hilarious audition tape for White House
press secretary, presented Saturday night at the White House
Correspondents' Association dinner. (Be sure to watch until the end, when
he gets a cool reception from the president and Laura Bush.)
http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/politics/2006/04/30/colbert_white_house/index.html
and for an opinion of the above..
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/05/01/colbert /
As violence rages from Baghdad to
Beirut, George W. Bush was asked today to explain "what has happened to
America's clout in this region that you've committed yourself to
transform?" Here's how
he responded:
"It's an interesting period
because, instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a
sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root
causes of violence and instability. For a while, American foreign policy
was just, 'Let's hope everything is calm' -- kind of, managed calm. But
beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was
manifested on September the 11th. And so we've taken a foreign policy that
says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in
the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing
them to justice. Continued
Conyers (Continued)
In addition,
Conyers has introduced resolutions calling for the censure of both
Bush
and Vice President
Dick Cheney
for failing to respond to congressional inquiries about
the Downing Street memos and other issues related to the Iraq war.
The Conyers
resolutions, first reported in
Raw Story
and confirmed by Conyers' office, are tied to the release of
"The Constitution in Crisis,"
an "investigative status report" by the
staff to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. In its executive
summary, the report states that there is "substantial evidence the
president, the vice president and other high ranking members of the Bush
administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the
decision to go to war with Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence
information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture
and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and other legal violations in
Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their
administration." Further, the report says, there is a prima facie case
that the administration's actions "violated a number of federal laws,
including (1) Committing a Fraud against the United States; (2) Making
False Statements to Congress; (3) The War Powers Resolution; (4) Misuse of
Government Funds; (5) federal laws and international treaties prohibiting
torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; (6) federal laws
concerning retaliating against witnesses and other individuals; and (7)
federal laws and regulations concerning leaking and other misuse of
intelligence."
The report's
authors say that the charges "clearly rise to the level of impeachable
conduct," but they say that stonewalling by the Bush administration and a
lack of interest by Republicans in Congress mean that more work must be
done "before recommendations can be made regarding specific articles of
impeachment." The creation of a House select committee -- a move House
Republicans will no doubt block -- would be the first step to completing
that work.
(found at:
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/12/20/impeach2/index.html
-- Tim Grieve
[13:08 EST, Dec.
20, 2005
Democrats (Continued)
"Rather than
looking backward at yesterday's threats, we are building upon what we have
already accomplished to meet evolving threats," said Knocke.
According to the Democrats, since
the department began operating in March 2003, it has failed to:
--Compile a single, comprehensive
list prioritizing protections for the nation's most critical and
potentially vulnerable buildings, transportation systems and other
infrastructure.
--Install monitors at borders and
every international seaport and airport to screen for radiation material
entering the country.
--Install surveillance cameras at
all high-risk chemical plants.
--Create one effective network to
share quickly security-related intelligence and alerts with state, local
and private industry officials.
--Track foreign visitors through a
computerized system that takes their fingerprints and photographs as they
enter and exit the country.
"It would be one thing if the
department didn't identify security lapses in the first place, but a more
troubling situation when they make promises to the American people and
then leave them unfulfilled," Rep. Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, the
committee's top Democrat, said in a statement accompanying the report.
Although the department has missed
many of the original deadlines it set for some programs, it is working to
complete them.
In June, for example, Homeland
Security for the first time agreed to pursue federal security regulations
for chemical plants that have been mostly policed by private industry.
And last week, Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff said the department will have finished the
entry portion of the system to track foreigners -- named US-VISIT -- by
the end of the year at 115 airports, 14 seaports and 150 land crossings
into the country.--__
On the Net:
Homeland Security Department:
http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/index.jsp
House Homeland Security Committee
Democrats:
http://hsc-democrats.house.gov/
(found
at: http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8EOUCSO2.html)
Jack Abramoff (Continued)
--Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist, R-Tenn., $2,000 will be returned to the Michigan Saginaw
Chippewa Indian Tribe.
--Senate Minority Whip Dick
Durbin, D-Ill., $11,000 to the American Indian Center of Chicago
and the American Indian
Health Service of Chicago.
--Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich
Jr. (Republican), $16,000.
Senate Republicans:
--Kit Bond, R-Mo., $12,500
to the Salvation Army.
--Jim Bunning, R-Ky.,
$1,000 to the St. Elizabeth Medical Center inpatient hospice program.
--Thad Cochran, R-Miss.,
$8,000 to the Mississippi Hurricane Recovery Fund.
--Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C.,
$1,000 to charity.
--Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.,
$1,000 to charity.
--Judd Gregg, R-N.H.,
$12,000 to Marguerites Place.
--Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.,
refunding $4,000 to three Indian tribes.
--Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.,
$18,500 to the Wayside Christian Mission.
--Rick Santorum, R-Pa.,
$2,000 to charity.
--Gordon Smith, R-Ore.,
$8,500 to be refunded or for charity.
--John Sununu, R-N.H.,
$3,000 to charity.
--Jim Talent, R-Mo.,
$2,000 to be refunded. Talent also refunded $3,000 in August 2005.
--Craig Thomas, R-Wyo.,
$8,000 to victims of the 2005 tornado in Wright, Wyo.
--John Thune, R-S.D.,
$2,000 to White Buffalo Calf Woman Society.
--John W. Warner, R-Va.,
$1,000 to charity.
Senate Democrats:
--Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.,
$2,000 to charity.
--Tim Johnson, D-S.D.,
$8,250 to Billy Mills Running Strong for American Indian Youth.
--Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.,
$5,000, to the American Indian College Fund.
House Republicans:
--Rodney Alexander, R-La.,
$2,000 to charity.
--Dan Burton, R-Ind.,
$19,000 to charity.
--Chris Cannon, R-Utah,
$2,000.
--Eric Cantor, R-Va.,
about $10,000 to the William Byrd Community House.
--Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo.,
$250 to charity.
--Thomas M. Davis III, R-Va.,
amount uncertain.
--Kay Granger, R-Texas,
$2,000 to Boys and Girls Club of Greater Fort Worth.
--J. Randy Forbes, R-Va.,
$1,000 to charity.
--Melissa Hart, R-Pa.,
$2,000 to two women's shelters.
--J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz.,
$2,250 to the Salvation Army Katrina Disaster Fund.
--Walter Jones, R-N.C.,
$1,000 to the Salvation Army.
--Donald Manzullo, R-Ill.,
$2,000 to be returned to the Mississippi band of the Choctaw Indian
tribe.
--Jim McCrery, R-La.,
$35,000 to the Salvation Army.
--Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo.,
$1,000 to Crossroads Safehouse.
--Bob Ney, R-Ohio, $9,000
to charity.
--Chip Pickering, R-Miss.,
at least $2,500 to the Mississippi Hurricane Recovery Fund.
--Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio,
$8,000 to charity.
--Hal Rogers, R-Ky.,
$32,000 to the UNITE Foundation.
--Paul Ryan, R-Wis., $949
to USO Operation Phone Home.
--Jim Saxton, R-N.J.,
$7,000 total refunded in 2004, 2005 and 2006.
--Bill Shuster, R-Pa.,
$1,000 to charity.
--John Sweeney, R-N.Y.,
$2,000 to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
--Curt Weldon, R-Pa.,
$2,000 to charity.
--Jerry Weller, R-Ill., at
least $500 to charity.
--Roger Wicker, R-Miss.,
$250 to Mississippi Hurricane Recovery Fund.
--Heather Wilson, R-N.M.,
$1,000 to the Great Southwest Council of the Boy Scouts of
America.
House Democrats:
--Henry Cuellar, D-Texas,
$500 to be returned to the Tigua tribe of El Paso.
--Eliot Engel, D-N.Y.,
$1,000 to be returned to the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe.
--Lane Evans, D-Ill.,
$2,000 to Community Caring Conference.
--Tim Holden, D-Pa.,
$1,000 to an animal shelter.
--Nita Lowey, D-N.Y.,
$2,000 to be refunded.
--Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D.,
$6,950 to be refunded.
--Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.,
$2,000 to charity.
December 2005:
--Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.,
$18,892 to seven tribal colleges.
--Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.,
$42,000 to charity.
--Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont.,
about $150,000 donated to Native American charities and
refunded.
--Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D.,
$3,750 to North Dakota's tribal colleges.
--Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.,
$67,000 refunded.
--Rep. Ernest Istook, R-Okla.,
$6,000 to the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.
--Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont.,
$19,900 refunded and given to charity.
August-November 2005
--Rep. Mike Ferguson, R-N.J.,
$1,000 to the Children's Specialized Hospital Foundation.
--Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-N.J.,
returned $1,000.
--Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio,
$1,000 to the American Indian College Fund.
--Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn.,
$1,250 to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.
February 2002
--Sen. David Vitter, R-La.,
$6,000 refunded.
(Found at:
http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8EUNIVO2.html)
IRS (Continued)
Speaking of which , Johnston's
second story hits another subject that the IRS would probably rather
not have the public discussing: The IRS's taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson,
told Congress this week that the agency has devoted what Johnston calls
"vastly more resources to pursuing questionable refunds sought by the poor
-- which under the highest estimate is $9 billion -- than to the $100
billion in taxes not paid each year by people who work for cash and either
fail to file tax returns or understate their income."
Along the way, Olson told
Congress that the IRS has, over the last five years, frozen tax refunds
owed to 1.6 million poor Americans. Most of those filers had claimed the
earned-income credit, and most had done absolutely nothing wrong: A
sampling by Olson's staff found that 66 percent of the Americans whose
refunds were being withheld as "fraudulent" were entitled to the refunds
they sought -- or even more. The amount of money involved isn't
insignificant, at least to the families that aren't getting it. Olson's
study found that that the average annual income reported on the frozen
returns was $13,000. The average frozen refund was $3,500.
(found at:
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/01/11/irs/index.html)
Rove Continued
By the
standards of Washington soap opera, Rove's luncheon address offered
the kind of melodrama that only C-SPAN could love. But taken together with
a morning speech by RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, this rhetorical onslaught
offered intriguing clues about where the Republican high command wants to
position the party for the congressional elections. Both Rove and Mehlman
were playing to their base -- the state chairmen and elephant-pin-wearing
local stalwarts who constitute the pachyderm heart of the Republican
Party.
The two speeches, which were only
intermittently interrupted by applause, should not be parsed the same way
as a George W. Bush campaign appearance or an interview session on a
Sunday talk show. For despite the TV cameras hoping for Rovian
pyrotechnics and the three dozen political reporters missing the campaign
season, the true audience for these low-key talks were the political
professionals in the room and not the unwashed mass of voters at home.
What Rove and Mehlman offered could have been billed as "Talking Points to
Give to Your Candidates."
Rove, in particular, honed his
message down to three big themes -- national security ("America is at
war"), the economy ("We're heading into 2006 with a full head of steam")
and the courts ("Two extraordinary judges: John Roberts and Samuel Alito").
As a result, the speech was like the dog that didn't bark in the Sherlock
Holmes story.
The most important clues were
found in the topics that Rove neglected to mention. No reference was made
to Social Security (remember the Bush privatization plan that was designed
as the centerpiece of the second term?), health care (anyone want a flawed
prescription-drug program?) or energy (didn't our future depend on Arctic
drilling?). The advisor once called "Bush's brain" also took a Pasadena on
congressional reform, though Mehlman did declare in his best
I-hate-lobbyists indignation, "If Republicans are guilty of illegal or
inappropriate behavior, they should pay the price and suffer the
consequences."
What Rove underscored in his
stripped-down presentation was the degree to which the White House is
gearing up for another "He Protected Us Against Osama bin Laden Even If We
Can't Find Him" election. For terrorism remains the most potent political
argument for reelecting a Republican Congress. Iraq may be a quagmire, but
Rove and Co. are stuck with it. That is why Democratic critics will
constantly hear variants of Rove's assertion, "To retreat before victory
has been won would be a reckless act -- and the president and our party
will not allow it."
Rove and Mehlman seized on the
attacks on the National Security Agency's outside-the-law eavesdropping
with such zest that it was clear that they regarded the leak of the story
to the New York Times as a political plus for the president. (Note to the
blogosphere: I am not a conspiracy theorist suggesting that the
Republicans are the leakers in this case.) As Rove put it, "President Bush
believes if al-Qaida is calling somebody in America, it is in our
national-security interest to know who they're calling and why. Some
important Democrats clearly disagree. This is an issue worthy of a public
debate." The message for the congressional Democrats from this ought to be
that the Republicans are going to attack them as weaklings no matter what
they do, so instead of rolling over and bleating "We love warrantless
wiretapping too," they ought to go down fighting.
Yes, Rove also talked about the
economy (message: the tax cuts worked) and the Supreme Court (message: our
say-nothing nomination strategy worked). But a Republican running for
reelection promising tax cuts is as boring to the voters as a Democrat
vowing to protect every hair on the graying head of the Social Security
program. And while getting Roberts and (soon) Alito on the Supreme Court
represents a major triumph for Bush, this sweeping victory also makes it
nearly impossible for the GOP to rail against the so-called liberal
Supreme Court in the 2006 elections.
Other presidents, particularly Bill
Clinton, needed the Permanent Campaign to sustain them politically. As
Rove demonstrated Friday in his first out-from-hiding speech since
November, Bush and the Republicans are banking everything politically on
the Permanent War.
(Found at:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/01/21/rove/)
Rogue State (Continued)
By
Friday morning, "Rogue State" was ranked No. 35 on Amazon, just behind
Harry Potter and just ahead of Strunk & White. At home, in his small
Connecticut Avenue apartment, Blum was delighted to learn from a reporter
news about his newfound profitability. "Oh my God," the author exclaimed,
wearing his morning slippers as he scribbled the Amazon statistics on a
pad of paper. "I must tell my publisher."
It was the latest shocker in a
two-day whirlwind for Blum, a former State Department employee whose
ideological views fall somewhere between those of Noam Chomsky and Ramsey
Clark. A simple, earnest man, with a grandfather beard and gold-rimmed
glasses, he is used to the quiet life, working at his computer on his
e-newsletter, the Anti-Empire Report, and taking walks in the
neighborhood. But he did not sleep much Thursday night, following a trio
of last-minute television appearances on CNN, ABC News and MSNBC. "Are you
familiar with MSNBC? Is that on the Internet?" he asked, his antenna-only
television sitting a few feet away. "If one has cable one can get that?"
Then the phone rang. It was a
producer for National Public Radio, who wanted to book him on a show. The
Times of London and the New York Post had called minutes earlier. Then
Christopher Dickey, of Newsweek, was on the line from Paris. A moment
later, a reporter for the Washington Post style section. "That's the
Washington Post," Blum said, after hanging up the phone. "They will not
print any of my letters ever, but now they are sending over a man to
interview me." The phone rang again. The Post wanted to send a
photographer. "Oh boy," said Blum, who wore a loose-fitting plaid shirt.
"This is very new. I have a very fixed daily routine of taking care of my
e-mail, and my e-mail has ballooned beyond my control."
It's easy enough to see why bin
Laden chose Blum -- despite the fact that Blum grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
the child of Jewish immigrants from Poland. In the first line of "Rogue
State," Blum writes, "Washington's war on terrorism is as doomed to
failure as its war on drugs has been." This fits securely into the
singular theme that Blum has pursued through four books. "The U.S.
government does not mean well. It doesn't care whether it does good or
bad," he explained. "The second lesson is that anti-American terrorists
are not motivated at all by things cultural. It's what we do. It's
American foreign policy."
Over the years, Blum's books have
been translated into 15 different languages, including Chinese, Korean,
Greek, Finnish, Spanish and two Arabic editions. They are all displayed on
one of the many bookshelves in his small living room, a converted office
otherwise decorated with the detritus of an activist's life: A dollar bill
with President Bush's face and the words "The United States of
Aggression"; a Project Censored award; and a lapel pin that says, "Gay
Whales Against Racism." He admits, "I am not very p.c."
He arrived in Washington in the
1960s, an avowed anti-communist with dreams of joining the Foreign
Service. But his State Department career was cut short after he became a
leader in the local protests against the Vietnam War. He later founded a
short-lived alternative magazine called the Washington Free Press, which
he admits in retrospect was not Pulitzer quality. "The others thought that
editing was bourgeois," he said. The Free Press folded in 1970, and Blum
began traveling the world, living in Chile during the presidency of
Salvador Allende, in Germany and in England. His wife, whom he is
separated from, still lives in Germany with their 24-year-old son. He
published his first book in 1986, "The CIA: A Forgotten History," which
received back-cover blurbs from Gore Vidal and Oliver Stone.
As for his newest booster, Blum
offers no apologies. "The people who have interviewed me in the last few
days, they keep pressing me to say how repulsed I am to get a plug from
Osama bin Laden. I am not repulsed." That is not to say he has any
sympathy for bin Laden's brand of violence or religious extremism, only
that he is not surprised that bin Laden agrees with his writing. "I hate
any kind of religious fundamentalism," he says. He did not support U.S.
military actions in Afghanistan or Iraq, but he says he would hate to see
bin Laden and his crew in charge of either country. "The oppression of
women," he says. "The whole thing turns me off."
"Rogue State" was originally
published before the attacks of Sept. 11. Bin Laden, perhaps lacking a
fact-checking department or easy access to a library, actually never
quoted from that book. In his video, he used words from one of Blum's
later works, "Freeing the World to Death." The inaccurate citation doesn't
bother Blum, who stands behind the writing that caught bin Laden's eye:
"If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the
United States in a few days. Permanently," reads the section quoted in
part by the world's most notorious terrorist. "I would first apologize to
all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the
many millions of other victims of American imperialism." In that passage,
Blum goes on to explain that he would end American support for Israel and
reduce the military budget by 90 percent. "That's what I'd do on my first
three days in the White House," Blum writes. "On the fourth day, I'd be
assassinated."
Who would assassinate him? Blum
smiled at the question. Standing at the center of an international media
swarm, he raised his arms and extended his forefingers to pantomime
quotation marks. He paused for dramatic effect.
"Them."
(found at:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/01/21/bin_laden_book/index.html)
Lawrence Wilkerson (Continued)
Wilkerson said that by the time of
the Abu Ghraib revelations in spring 2004, he began to realize how "deeply
contaminated" the military had become due to post-9/11 interrogation
policies. A military man of 31 years, he knew that the widespread abuses
could have taken place only if sanctioned from high up in the civilian and
military leadership.
Powell, who had served as the
nation's top general under the first President Bush, apparently knew so,
too. "When the word was out that the Abu Ghraib photographs were about to
break, the secretary of state walked through my door and said, 'Larry, I
need you to get together with Will Taft [Powell's lawyer] and build me an
audit trail. I need all the paperwork -- I need a description of how we
got to where we are.'"
Over the next several months,
Wilkerson developed a dossier of both internal and public materials that
pointed to the vice president's office. "I saw a chain of information and
orders going out to the field that were codified in memoranda," Wilkerson
said. "Reading between the lines -- and sometimes even reading the lines
-- they essentially said, 'This is a new war. These people are different.
Geneva doesn't apply, and we need intelligence. So smack these guys, stack
'em up. Use whatever means you need.'" The materials he gathered and the
many communications he had with people in the field formed a clear
picture. "What got implemented in the field," he said, "was the position
Cheney and Rumsfeld argued for all along: gloves off."
In response to the initial wave
of Abu Ghraib revelations, Rumsfeld said in a congressional hearing on May
7, 2004: "Mr. Chairman, I know you join me today in saying to the world:
Judge us by our actions. Watch how Americans, watch how a democracy deals
with wrongdoing and scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting
our own mistakes and weaknesses."
While a handful of enlisted
soldiers have since been convicted of crimes, no high-level U.S. officials
have been brought to justice for wrongdoing. International law as well as
the U.S. military's doctrine of command responsibility holds that
officials -- military or civilian -- who condone or allow subordinates to
commit torture can also be held criminally liable. But the military has
thwarted investigation "every step of the way," Wilkerson said. "I got
little help from the services," he said of his work on the torture
dossier. "Vice Admiral [Albert] Church [who led one of the military's own
investigations into torture] more or less stonewalled me. Others
stonewalled me. There's been an awful lot of coverup."
According to Wilkerson, one of
several memos signed by Rumsfeld approved dozens of interrogation
techniques, which were posted in Abu Ghraib. One item on the list
sanctioned the use of military dogs. "When you tell an E-4 [an Army
corporal] or E-6 [staff sergeant] they can use a dog as long as it's
muzzled -- and you also put heavy pressure on them to get intelligence --
it's clear what happens next. Once that muzzled dog fails in that
interrogation session, the next thing they're going to do is take the
muzzle off."
More abominable, Wilkerson said,
is that these conditions weren't set just for suspected al-Qaida or
Taliban members, but for any of the tens of thousands of prisoners taken
in Iraq whom Bush had declared entitled to Geneva protections. The
military has acknowledged that the vast majority of prisoners in Iraq --
as well as the majority of those in Guantánamo -- have been of little or
no intelligence value.
Wilkerson, 60, exited the Bush
government along with his former boss in January 2005; he now teaches at
George Washington University and the College of William and Mary. He
speaks in direct and sometimes folksy language, his accent evocative of
small-town South Carolina, where he grew up. The son of a World War II
veteran, Wilkerson decided in 1966 to drop his English lit studies at
Bucknell University and to serve in Vietnam. The Army career to which he
dedicated half his life began with service as a helicopter pilot scouting
for the infantry, which took him repeatedly into heavy combat.
After the war, Wilkerson attended
the elite Airborne and Ranger schools, completed his B.A. and earned
advanced degrees in international relations and national-security studies.
He attended and taught at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and went
on to serve as acting director of the Marine Corps War College at
Quantico, Va. Wilkerson met Powell in 1989, beginning his 16 years on
Powell's staff as an aide and speechwriter, rising to become Powell's top
deputy during George W. Bush's first term.
Naturally, Wilkerson has drawn
fierce counterattacks for his criticisms, notably from the president's
loyal lieutenants. As Powell's point man for preparing the case for a war
on Iraq, he received top-level intelligence briefings. Nevertheless, in
November, Rumsfeld called Wilkerson's charges "ridiculous," telling CNN,
"In terms of having firsthand information, I just can't imagine that he
does." Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that
he had no recollection of Wilkerson's attending meetings with military
commanders, the National Security Council or the president. "I have never
seen that colonel," Pace said.
Wilkerson responded to a
recounting of those comments by noting that Pace had been his immediate
supervisor back at the Marine Corps War College. "We sat in the chapel
together when a dear friend of ours was buried," he said. "He came into my
seminars. Pete Pace not knowing me? Come on. That was an embarrassing
moment."
Wilkerson has the ability to
listen keenly and hold his opinions in reserve. During the panel
discussion at the University of Maryland, he sat back as fellow speaker
Frank Gaffney, the tenaciously right-wing founder of the Center for
Security Policy in Washington, responded to most audience questions by
preaching about the apocalyptic horrors likely to be unleashed on America
and the rest of the civilized world by "Islamofacism." Still, by the time
Gaffney declared, "Like it or not, we're in a war that will last the rest
of our lives, and likely our children's and grandchildren's lives,"
Wilkerson rolled his eyes, and along with a slight, incredulous smile,
glanced at his watch.
Wilkerson's voice rose in anger
when he discussed what he saw as the "hijacking" of policy inside the
administration. "Those people are not conservatives," the lifelong
Republican said of Cheney and his inner circle. "I'm a conservative. Those
people are radicals."
Accounts of the manipulation of
intelligence by administration hard-liners in the march to war have
continued to emerge in recent months. In 2003, when Powell presented his
case to the United Nations on Saddam Hussein's biological weapons, he
relied heavily on intelligence gleaned from an Iraqi defector code-named
"Curveball." But according to an in-depth report published in the Los
Angeles Times in November, top CIA operations officials, including then
chief of clandestine services James Pavitt, had grave doubts about
Curveball long before Powell's U.N. speech. They'd determined Curveball
was unstable, an opportunist and a fabricator, and had sounded the alarm
about him repeatedly. "My people were saying, 'We think he's a stinker,'"
Pavitt, who retired from the agency in August 2004, told the Times. But
former CIA director George Tenet, who had told the president there was a
"slam dunk" case for war, maintained that deep skepticism about Curveball
never reached him.
"Preposterous," Wilkerson said.
"It's extremely difficult for me to believe that James Pavitt's doubts
didn't get through to Tenet. Pavitt was one of Tenet's principal operators
in the CIA."
Today, Wilkerson continues to see
an administration that punishes dissent, pushes a radical reinterpretation
of the Constitution, and exploits executive power. "Brent Scowcroft said
he didn't recognize Dick Cheney anymore," he said. "I don't know Dick
Cheney as intimately as Scowcroft does, but I did see him as secretary of
defense and now as vice president. I can tell you that 9/11 made him a
paranoid, to the extent where I'm not sure his exercise of power carries
with it reason."
"I've been told by several
Republicans that Cheney was the first vice president ever to come sit down
in the middle of a [Senate] caucus and chide the members on their votes,"
Wilkerson added. "This is not going to the CIA, where he also exercised
undue influence -- this is going to the Congress and using the office of
the vice president essentially to intimidate lawmakers in their
discussions."
Wilkerson expressed genuine
concerns about terrorism. But he said the administration has played the
fear card with lawmakers by suggesting that if the United States gets hit
again, it will be their fault unless they back such policies as
warrantless spying on Americans and the brutal interrogation of prisoners.
Such interrogation led Wilkerson
to cite Aharon Barak, the chief of the Israeli Supreme Court, which ruled
against the torture of prisoners in 1999. "This is the destiny of a
democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices
employed by its enemies are open before it," Barak wrote in the decision.
"Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back,
it nonetheless has the upper hand."
Losing that upper hand, Wilkerson
said, "is a very dangerous thing."
(Found at:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/27/wilkerson/index.html)
Garrison
Keillor (Continued)
The Feb. 27 issue of the New Yorker
carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and
U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of
prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did
battle against Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo at the Justice Department and
shadowy figures taking orders from Dick (Gunner) Cheney, arguing America
had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and
degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They
seemed to be arguing that the president has the right to order prisoners
to be tortured.
One such prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani,
was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by
dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes, and otherwise abused, so that
he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the
Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically
intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Is the
law a law or is it a piece of toast?
Wiretap surveillance of Americans
without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports
to a country more closely tied to 9/11 than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by
me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck
of a job, Brownie. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down
shirt -- it's you.
But torture is something else.
When Americans start pulling people's fingernails out with pliers and
poking lighted cigarettes into their palms, then we need to come back to
basic values. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts
the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their
e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is
impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and
it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the
truth will come out. It is coming out now.
According to the leaders of the
bipartisan 9/11 Commission, our country is practically as vulnerable today
as it was on 9/10. Our seaports are wide open, our airspace is not secure
except for the nation's capital, and little has been done about securing
the nuclear bomb materials lying around in the world. They give the
administration D's and F's in most categories of defending against
terrorist attack.
Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost
of trillions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while
earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for
security is being dumped into pork barrel projects anywhere somebody wants
their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders --
pick any big city -- is a real possibility, as much so now as five years
ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security
and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of
Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to
defend this country. We might rather be comedians or daddies or tattoo
artists or flamenco dancers, but we must attend to first things.
The peaceful lagoon that is the
White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly
understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides
a simple ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the
failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate
hear the evidence.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home
Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across
the country.)
(found at:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/03/01/keillor)
Bush, Chertoff Warned
Before Katrina (Continued)
Linked by secure video, Bush's
bravado on Aug. 29 starkly contrasts with the dire warnings his disaster
chief and a cacophony of federal, state and local officials provided
during the four days before the storm.
A top hurricane expert voiced
"grave concerns" about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management
Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster
teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.
"I'm concerned about ... their
ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe," Brown told his
bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.
Some of the footage conflicts
with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in
trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed
Katrina response:
--Homeland Security officials
have said the "fog of war" blinded them early on to the magnitude of the
disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials
discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina
would wreak devastation of historic proportions. "I'm sure it will be the
top 10 or 15 when all is said and done," National Hurricane Center's Max
Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.
"I don't buy the `fog of war'
defense," Brown told the AP in an interview Wednesday. "It was a fog of
bureaucracy."
--Bush declared four days after the
storm, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" that
gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video
show there was plenty of talk about that possibility -- and Bush was
worried too.
(found at:
http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8G31KPG2.html)
Scholars Repudiate
Official Version of 9/11 (Continued)..
The society includes U.S. and
international faculty and students of history, science, military affairs,
psychology, and even philosophy. According to its spokesmen, S9/11T
represents a concerted effort to uphold the standards of truth and justice
and to strengthen democracy in this nation, which has taken a terrible hit
in the aftermath of 9/11, when "everything changed." Its function is to
bring scientific rigor to the study of 9/11 phenomena.
The members of this group are
dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11,
"letting the chips fall where they may." The evidence has become
sufficiently strong that they are speaking out. They are actively devoting
themselves to reporting the results of their research to the public by
means of lectures, articles, and other venues.
The society includes numerous
notable professors and scholars, including:
- Morgan Reynolds, Texas A & M
Professor Emeritus of Economics, former Chief Economist for the
Department of Labor for President George W. Bush, and former Director of
the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis
- Steven E. Jones, Professor of
Physics, Brigham Young University, co-chair of S9/11T and the creator of
its home page and its forum
- Robert M. Bowman, former
Director of the U.S. "Star Wars" Space Defense Program in both
Republican and Democratic administrations, and a former Air Force
Lieutenant Colonel with 101 combat missions
- Lloyd DeMause, Director of The
Institute for Psychohistory, President of the International
Psychohistorical Association and Editor of The Journal of Psychohistory
- James H. Fetzer, Distinguished
McKnight University Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Minnesota, Duluth, author or editor of more than 20 books and co-chair
of S9/11T
- Andreas Von Buelow, former
assistant German defense minister, director of the German Secret
Service, minister for research and technology, and member of Parliament
for 25 years
The society, founded by
Professors Fetzer and Jones, who serve as its co-chairs, is approaching 50
members to date. Fetzer, a philosopher of science, observed that the
government's "official account" is not even physically possible, because
it violates laws of nature. "What we have been told is fine," he said, "if
you are willing to believe impossible things. Serious scholars don't
believe in tooth fairies." Beyond encouraging its members to vigorously
express their concerns on this score through lectures, conferences,
symposia, articles, and books as well as other access routes that
publicize their findings,the society's initial activities, which are
expected to increase in frequency and intensity, include the following
projects and endeavors:
Professor Jones is refining his
influential analysis of the physics of the collapse of buildings at the
World Trade Center.
Professor Fetzer is editing a
collection of new studies about 9/11 that will include contributions from
the members of S9/11T.
A major conference is being planned
for this fall to further inform the American public about the group's most
recent findings Studies by the society's founders and by prominent
theologian David Ray Griffin, who has taken a leading role in exposing
false claims about 9/11, are accessible from the association's home page,
www.scholarsfor911truth.org Information for those who may want
to join S9/11T can also be found there.
(Found at
http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/PressRelease27Jan2006.html)
For more information:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=psP_9RE0V2I
George W. Bush on
the lessons learned in Iraq (continued)
Now, I understand there's a
difference of opinion in a country. Some view the attack as kind of an
isolated incident. I don't. I view it as a part of a strategy by a
totalitarian, ideologically based group of people who've announced their
intentions to spread that ideology and to attack us again. That's what
they've said they're going to do. And the most dangerous -- the biggest
danger facing our country is whether -- if the terrorists get a weapons of
mass destruction to use. Now, perhaps some in our country think it's a --
that's a pipedream; I don't. I think it is a very real threat, and
therefore, will spend my presidency rallying our assets -- intelligence
assets, military assets, financial assets, diplomatic initiatives -- to
keep the enemy off balance, and to bring them to justice.
"Now, if you're going to be the
president or a policymaker, you never know what's going to come. That's
the interesting thing about the world in which we live. We're a
influential nation, and so, therefore, many problems come to the Oval
Office. And you don't know what those problems are going to be, which then
argues for having smart people around. That's why you ought to serve in
government if you're not going to be the president. You have a chance to
influence policy by giving good recommendations to the president.
"You got to listen in my line of
work, and I listen a lot. Ours is a complex organization that requires a
management structure that lets people come into the Oval Office and
explain their positions. And I think it's to my interest, by the way, that
not everybody agree all the time. You can't make good decisions unless
there's a little -- kind of a little agitation in there. And sometimes we
have.
"But anyway, good question. I
guess, my answer to your question is, is that you got to be ready for the
unexpected. And when you act, you base your decisions on principles. I'll
tell you one principle -- I'm not going to filibuster, I promise -- but
you got me going here, so --. I want you to understand this principle, and
it's an important debate and it's worth debating here in this school, as
to whether or not freedom is universal, whether or not it's a universal
right of all men and women. It's an interesting part of the international
dialogue today. And I think it is universal. And if you believe it's
universal, I believe this country has -- should act on that concept of
universality. And the reason I do is because I do believe freedom yields
the peace.
"And our foreign policy prior to
my arrival was 'if it seems okay, leave it alone.' In other words, if it's
nice and placid out there on the surface, it's okay, just let it sit. But
unfortunately, beneath the surface was resentment and hatred, and that
kind of resentment and hatred provided ample recruitment, fertile grounds
for recruiting people that came and killed over 3,000 of our citizens. And
therefore, I believe the way to defeat resentment is with freedom and
liberty.
"But if you don't believe it's
universal, I can understand why you say, what's he doing, why is he doing
that? If there's no such thing as the universality of freedom, then we
might as well just isolate ourselves and hope for the best.
"And so -- anyway, kind of
rambling here. Yes."
-- Tim Grieve
(Found at
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/04/10/bush/index.html)
Pony (Continued)
"And make no mistake: They're still
out there, and they would like to harm our respective peoples because of
what we stand for. In the long term, to defeat this ideology -- and
they're bound by an ideology -- you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology
called freedom. And, look, I fully understand some people don't believe
it's possible for freedom and democracy to overcome this ideology of
hatred. I understand that. I just happen to believe it is possible. And I
believe it will happen.
"And so what you're seeing is,
you know, a clash of governing styles.
"For example, you know, the
notion of democracy beginning to emerge scares the ideologues, the
totalitarians, those who want to impose their vision. It just frightens
them. And so they respond. They've always been violent.
"You know, I hear this amazing
kind of editorial thought that says, all of a sudden, Hezbollah's become
violent because we're promoting democracy. They have been violent for a
long period of time. Or Hamas? One reason why the Palestinians still
suffer is because there are militants who refuse to accept a Palestinian
state based upon democratic principles.
"And so what the world is seeing
is a desire by this country and our allies to defeat the ideology of hate
with an ideology that has worked and that brings hope. And one of the
challenges, of course, is to convince people that Muslims would like to be
free, that there's other people other than people in Britain and America
that would like to be free in the world.
"There's this kind of almost --
kind of a weird kind of elitism that says well maybe -- maybe certain
people in certain parts of the world shouldn't be free; maybe it's best
just to let them sit in these tyrannical societies. And our foreign policy
rejects that concept. And we don't accept it. And so we're working.
"And this is -- I said the other
day, when these attacks took place, I said it should be a moment of
clarity for people to see the stakes in the 21st century. I mean, now
there's an unprovoked attack on a democracy. Why? I happen to believe
because progress is being made toward democracies.
"And I believe that -- I also
believe that Iran would like to exert additional influence in the region;
a theocracy would like to spread its influence using surrogates.
"And so I'm as determined as ever to
continue fostering a foreign policy based upon liberty. And I think it's
going to work unless we lose our nerve and quit. And this government isn't
going to quit." -- Tim Grieve
(Found at:
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/07/28/bush/index.html)
Senate Panel Accuses Bush of Iraq
Exaggerations
|
Found at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/washington/05cnd-intel.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1212735837-ZcSJb7qH4s6E/fafHrv7wg |
By
MARK MAZZETTI and
SCOTT SHANE
Published: June
5, 2008
WASHINGTON — A
long-delayed Senate report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans has
concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war
against
Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring
disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and
Saddam Hussein’s links to
Al Qaeda.
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Related
Reports (pdf):
Intelligence Activities |
Public Statements
The report was released
Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it marks the close of
five years of investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the
use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading up to the
invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That some Bush
administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is
hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public
statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, is the most comprehensive
effort to date to assess whether policymakers systematically painted a
more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by available intelligence.
The 170-page report
accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President
Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating
the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Its
findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two
Republicans, Senators Olympia Snowe of Maine and
Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.
In a statement
accompanying the report, Senator
John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is
chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said: “The president and his
advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the
attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for
overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”
Dana Perino, the White House spokesman, on Thursday called the
report a “selective view,” and said the Bush administration’s public
statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress
and endorsed by foreign intelligence services. Senator
Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the committee’s top
Republican, called the report a “waste of committee time and resources.”
The report on the
prewar statements about Iraq found that on some key issues — most notably
Iraq’s purported nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs — the
public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other senior officials
were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates at the time from
American intelligence agencies. But the report found that the
administration officials’ statements usually did not reflect the
intelligences agencies’ uncertainties about the evidence or disputes among
them.
In a separate report,
the Intelligence Committee provided new details about a series of
clandestine meetings in Rome and Paris between Pentagon officials and
Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions
about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran, and
they were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about
internal rivalries inside of Iran and suspected Iranian “hit” team
targeting American troops in Afghanistan.
The report concludes
that
Stephen J. Hadley, now the national security adviser, and
Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, “acted
within their authorities” to dispatch the Pentagon officials to Rome. At
the same time, the report criticized the meetings as ill-advised and
accused Mr. Hadley and Mr. Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and
intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings, which it portrayed
as part of a rogue intelligence operation.
The two reports were
the final parts of the committee’s so-called “phase two” investigation of
prewar intelligence on Iraq and related issues. The first phase of the
inquiry, begun in the summer of 2003 and completed in July 2004,
identified grave faults in the
Central Intelligence Agency’s analysis of the threat posed by
Mr. Hussein.
The report was
especially critical of statements by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney that linked
Iraq to Al Qaeda and raised the possibility that Mr. Hussein might supply
the terrorist group with weapons of mass destruction. “Representing to the
American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a
single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the
nation to war on false premises,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote.
Mr. Bond and four other
Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report’s findings
and suggested the investigation was a partisan smokescreen to obscure the
real story: that Central Intelligence Agency failed the Bush
administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policymakers that
have since been discredited.
In a detailed minority
report, four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and their
own campaign of cherry-picking — namely, refusing to include misleading
public statements by such top Democrats as Senator
Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Mr. Rockefeller.
As an example, they
pointed to an October 2002 speech by Mr. Rockefeller, who declared to his
Senate colleagues that he had arrived at the “inescapable conclusion that
the threat posed to America by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction is so
serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we
must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the
threat.”
The report about the
Bush administration’s public statements does shed some new detail about
the intelligence information available to policymakers as they built a
case for war. In September 2002, for instance, Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee
that “the Iraq problem cannot be solved by airstrikes alone” because Iraqi
chemical and biological weapons were so deeply buried that they could not
be penetrated by American bombs.
Two months later,
however, the National Intelligence Council wrote an assessment for Mr.
Rumsfeld concluding that the Iraqi underground weapons facilities
identified by the intelligence agencies “are vulnerable to conventional,
precision-guided, penetrating munitions because they are not deeply
buried.”
On Thursday, Senator
Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democratic member of the Intelligence
Committee, said Congress was never told about the National Intelligence
Council assessment.
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